These Days (Questi Giorni) is the last movie by Giuseppe Piccioni (listen here our Afternoon Tea interview with him in Italian) presented at the BFI London Film Festival in the session Journey.

Loosely based on the unpublished novel “Color Betulla Giovane” by Marta Bertini, These Days is a bittersweet road movie following four young girls in their twenties in a trip from Bari to Belgrade to chaperoned one of them to her new life, metaphor of the journey to a new different future.

Even if apparently really close to each other, the four girls are really different: Caterina (Marta Gastini, The Borgia‘s on TV)  is the one who decided to leave Italy and start a new life in Belgrade, angry with the world and quick-tempered as in love with her best friend Liliana (Maria Roveran). Liliana is the “mature” one with a never grown up mother, Adria (an extraordinary Margherita Buy), a terrible secret about her health and  in love with her much older professor. Anna (Caterina Le Caselle) is the naïf one, with her sweet eyes, the diligent violinist student pregnant by her boyfriend/soon husband as “it’s right” who sees this trip as her last moment of freedom and then Angela. Angela is the one who can see thought the candle light what the future has in store for her and that’s the reason why she already knew that Valerio (Giulio Corso) can’t be the one in her life. A trip that breaks the precarious balance of their friendship.

The first leg is at  Caterina‘s brother, a priest who can help them but who needs their help too. In the role of the priest, another remarkable performance by great Italian actor Alessandro Averone.

Belgrade and not London or Amsterdam as last leg because is the destination that counts not the trip. And a curtain to bring to first-rate the true story of an old cinema intended to be closed and the young fight to save it.

A good movie with a great cast, from the four young girls to the adult ones (in the cast also Filippo Timi as the professor) but, as most of the recently Italian movies, a 120 minutes film  at least 20 minutes too long; especially when it follows the rigid  schemes that encumbers most of the Italian movies at the festival.

“During these days nothing happened but everything changed”